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"When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. "We need courses for this thing - yesterday!""

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."

The Social Computing Symposium 2012 focuses on the changing nature of "the public," and is held on the campus of New York University in the Interactive Telecommunication Program space on January 12-13. Since 2004, Microsoft Research (MSR) has sponsored an annual symposium on social computing that has brought together academic and industry researchers, social startups, writers, and influential commentators in order to open new lines of communication among previously disconnected groups.